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Great question! You should probably ask a real doctor, not an information security guy.

Since I’ve already had a weight-loss surgery I’m going to spoil the end of the article for you: I went with the gastric sleeve.

Based on the propaganda supplied by my glorious surgeon and a little bit of googling, there’s three main types of bariatric surgery. There’s the bypass, the sleeve, and the band.

There’s 3 ways I weigh the different procedures. The first is the amount of weight lost (and kept off). The second are the health effects of the surgery. Finally, I consider the dietary requirements.

Gastric Bypass (Roux-en-Y Gastric Bypass)

This is the old fashioned standard bariatric surgery. It’s been around the longest so there’s the most studies for its effectiveness. I’ll explain the pros and cons, but first here’s a technical description of the procedure:

The doctor cuts you open and starts cutting your organs out.

Eventually the doctor gets tired, or a hand cramp or something, and stops removing vital organs.

In a rushed panic reminiscent of a 6th-grade science fair the doctor hastily plugs whatever’s left of your intestines into the bottom of your throat.Et viola! Really, though, wikipedia has a good description.

The gastric bypass is the older of the three surgeries so there’s been more time for studies showing how well it works. Turns out, it works the best for long-term weight loss. Wikipedia says a loss of 65–80% of excess weight is typical. I didn’t bother to see if that’s backed up at all because, man, I just love rolling the wikipedia dice.

You’ll have to deal with the fallout of bypassing more of your GI tract for absorbing vitamins and minerals by battling deficiencies for the rest of your life. Not an awesome Braveheart-style historically inaccurate battle; the kind of battle where you eat tons of chewable multivitamins forever and ever. Oh, yeah, you can’t ever have a regular pill again ever.

Gastric Sleeve (Sleeve Gastrectomy)

According to a study of a bunch of Poles, the sleeve and bypass have about the same long-term weight loss. Maaaybe you can lose a little more with the bypass, but it isn’t much if any.

There’s three ways bariatric surgery works. First, there’s restrictive. That’s simple; you’re restricted from shoveling so damn much Americone Dream into your face-hole. Second, there’s malabsorption. Malabsorption means that you don’t absorb as many nutrients (protein, carbs, etc.) from your food as you normally could. Third (and in terms of writing a 3-part paper, what a cop-out) is a combination of the two.

The gastric sleeve is a restrictive approach (as opposed to the gastric bypass’s combination approach). The downside to this is that you may not lose as much weight. The upside is that you avoid all of the vitamin and mineral deficiencies. You also miss out on most of the dumping syndrome.

As for the long-term changes to diet, there aren’t really any. Well, aside from the obvious change where I won’t eat so damn much. Remember above where I said gastric bypass patients are intolerant to “red meat, milk, sugar, and starches”? With the gastric sleeve I can still eat sensibly-small portions of all of those.

It’s a little bit safer than the bypass since there’s no rerouting of the intestines (yeah, I wasn’t kidding about that part). There’s lower risk of infection because of that as well. Since part of the stomach is removed the procedure is irreversible.

First, here’s what an adjustable gastric band is. Instead of rerouting your intestines or tossing most of the glorious stomach you’ve worked so hard on into the trash, the band just inserts a little loop around the inlet to your stomach. It’s like a surgically implanted Verne Troyer choking the shit out of your stomach 24×7. The awesome part is that it’s inflatable like a water wing, so the doctor can inflate (or deflate) your band as needed to allow you to lose the weight at a good rate.

You don’t lose weight as well as the other surgeries. That might not be as big a deal for my minimally-morbidly obese (is there such a thing?) friends, but it’s a thing. If you have the band adjusted to be wider, you can eat more so you won’t lose as much weight. If you have it adjusted tighter, then you weren’t losing as much weight as you could have been prior to the adjustment. I know I would have kept a get-out-of-jail-free card in the form of “Eh, I’ll just go have it adjusted.” It would have spelled doom. Doooooooooooooooom.

Oh, once the band is removed there’s nothing to stop you from just eating your way back to the top of fatass mountain. If I had that sort of self discipline to stop that amount of weight gain in the first place, I wouldn’t have needed surgery. So the outlook isn’t so good.

Gastric bands are restrictive so you aren’t going to have the same issues as with a gastric bypass. Instead, you get a whole bunch of other ones! Remember how I said the band chokes off the inlet of your stomach? Because of that you can’t have regular pills, you have to chew/puree everything you eat like crazy, and you have your own list of food intolerances: Red Meat, bread, pasta, rice, nuts, seeds, the skins of fruits and vegetables, and the membranes of citrus fruits.

Adjustable banding gets off kinda easy in the long-term comparison since it’s reversible. I have a couple of things here, though. First, remember what I said about just being able to yo-yo back up again. For me it was a real concern, and I imagine it may be for you too. Second, the adjustable band requires regular visits to your surgeon to have it adjusted.

So you get the hassle of going back often to have it adjusted. And while you’re at it, you have to worry about infections at the site of your port. Sure, you and the doctor probably view that port as place to import/export saline to inflate/deflate the gastric band. But nefarious germs will view that port as an easy way to import undeclared fruits and vegetables, illegal firearms, giant bales of marijuana, oh and MRSA right to your abdominal cavity.

Hey, at least it’s reversible.

My Verdict

Diet and exercise is the winner!

Just kidding. That’s ridiculous. And I’m not kidding about it being ridiculous. I’ll explain more in an upcoming post.

I got a sleeve gastrectomy. I really do think it was the best of the three options for me. It may be for you as well, but you’ve got to do your own homework.

I must confess I had a big help that didn’t really factor into the comparisons above. My sister had a gastric sleeve 8 months before I had mine. I was able to see first-hand all the problems and success she’s had. When I went in to the informational seminar I had a feeling I would end up with the sleeve. They presented all three types of surgeries and gave the same basic reasons I have here as to why they do mostly sleeves.

I’m feeling alright. My abs feel like I’ve been doing crunches all day (and yesterday (and the day before) )

The chicken broth here is delicious. Seriously.

This morning for breakfast I had beef broth and orange jello. I was so excited to try the beef broth that I ate too quickly. So now I have that thanksgiving stuffed feeling. From 1/2 cup of broth and a couple spoonfuls of jello.

The early check-in is welcome; since I can’t eat after midnight (doctor’s orders — I’ll turn into a gremlin). The sooner I am into surgery the less time i’ll spend being hungry.

Sorry to be morose, but there is a tiny sliver of a chance that I’ll die during the surgery. So, just to rub it in, here’s a list of the titles of upcoming posts you’ll miss out on:

In which I tell you how to ginsu your guts

Suddenly, everyone is a dietitian and personal trainer

No, you go fuck yourself, Guy Behind the Counter at Krispy Kreme

My family loves me

Some books to read

The 8:30 check-in gives us enough time to get all the kids off to school, assuming it isn’t cancelled. For the historians visiting from the future, there’s a winter storm going on right now so it’s possible that school will be cancelled tomorrow. If so, that’ll suck for my lovely wife who will have to deal with all the kids while I’m relaxing in bed and high as a kite on drugs.

I did some googling and so far haven’t seen anyone else describing this problem. I have, however, found some people complaining that the panels don’t line up correctly in UFO mode. Perhaps they have the same problem I do. I’m getting ahead of myself.

Symptoms:

In robot mode it’s nearly impossible to get Cosmos to stand up without support. I simply could not get his feet situated in any sort of stable pose. I didn’t take any pictures of him fallen over because there’s simply no reason to post such an embarrassing photo of a brave Autobot warrior.

In UFO mode the front of the disk dips down at an angle compared to the back of the toy. There’s also a gap between the top of the front of the disk and the central portion of the UFO. Both issues are shown here:

Mis-assembled Cosmos side view.Mis-assembled Cosmos front view.

Determining the problem

I examined as many pictures and reviews of Transformers Universe Legends Autobot Cosmos & Payload as I could find and soon discovered a discrepancy between the working toys in the reviews and mine.

His feet are on the wrong legs!

In other words, his left foot is on his right leg and his right foot is on his left leg. The bottoms of the feet aren’t flat; they’re at an angle to make the transformation work and allow him to stand. So being on the wrong legs means the angles won’t line up properly.

Is your Cosmos mis-assembled?

Transform Cosmos into UFO mode and examine the top and bottom of the front corners (these are his feet).

Look at the top. Look at the fin on the outside. Is it scooped out like this picture? If so, your Autobot Cosmos has this problem.

Detail of mis-assembled Cosmos figure.

Look at the bottom. Look at the fin on the outside. Is it scooped out like this picture? If so, your Autobot Cosmos is fixed. Also you can check the slots near the central hole on the bottom. There will be two slots as shown in this picture.

Underside detail of correctly assembled Cosmos

The fix

Swap his feet.

At first, I tried swapping the legs at the hips but it doesn’t work quite right. Swapping at the hips will put the blasters on top of the UFO disk and the transformation won’t be quite right because there’s supposed to be a cut-out on the bottom of the disk to allow for his crotch.

So, swap his feet. I used a pin punch to tap the pins holding his feet on out. There’s plenty of guides online for how to remove the pins so I suggest looking at a few (including Youtube demonstrations) before trying.

Cosmos with fixed legs

I have a watch repair kit with pin punches small enough for these pins, so I used that. The pins used are knurled and slightly larger at one end and smooth at the other. So you identify which end is knurled and then tap the pin out from the other end.

Then I swapped his feet to the other legs and reinstalled the pins. I tapped them in (smooth end first, the opposite of when I removed them) and it was all good.

I ran into a situation where I needed to remotely set the values in a user’s Internet Options control panel. With all the problems with SSL 2.0 and SSL 3.0 lately, we’ve pushed out configurations to block them. Some of our users have reported problems connecting to business-critical websites which aren’t working with our settings. So I need to remotely check the SSL 3.0 box for them.

To get this done I had two problems:

What values do I need to store in the registry?

Where do I store them?

First, find the keys.

I fired up procmon from Sysinternals and opened up my Internet Options control panel. With some trial and error I was able to narrow the settings i needed to change. The process is to change the settings in my UI (remember to click apply!) and watch the registry changes in procmon. In case you’re looking for exactly the same thing I am, changing the SSL/TLS settings, here’s the key you need:

This is a bitfield. To get the correct value, you just add up the options you want and then store that value in the registry.

I needed to have SSL 3.0, TLS 1.0, and TLS 1.1 enabled.

When you store the result in the registry, make sure you enter it in the expected format.

Regedit input dialog

Second, figure out where to store the values.

donde esta HKCU?

Now, just open up the remote registry and find HKEY_CURRENT_USER and and rock and roll!

Okay, going to have to pull some teeth here. The issue is that there really isn’t a HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive. When a user logs on, Windows maps their HKEY_USERS hive onto the HKCU hive. It makes things so much easier. Since we’re not logged on to this system as that user, we don’t get the easy version.

If your users generally have one PC each, you probably will see several short SIDs and a pair of long ones. The long one without “_classes” on the end is your user’s SID. But you can get a user’s SID via powershell to be 100% sure.

So in my case, I’ll need to use HKEY_Users\S-1-5-21-776511741-573735546-682002230-13423.

Put it all together.

Almost done, I swear. In regedit I connected to the remote computer then browsed to the right user’s HKEY_USERS key (that long SID we found earlier). I browsed to the key I found earlier, Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\SecureProtocols. Finally, I set the value I calculated, 672 (decimal).

Sites are fixing their SSL settings as fast as they can, so don’t just set something like this and forget it. Periodically test the sites your users require to see if they work with SSL 2.0 and SSL 3.0 disabled. Once they do, you can undo your changes.

I have a server with Microsoft .NET 1.1 installed and I have no idea why.

Naturally, we’ve lost all records regarding what is installed on that server. We have no idea why an old version of .NET is installed and which applications require the old version. In fact, we have no evidence that the old version is actually required.

So, how can I find out what .NET applications on this server require 1.1 ?

There is a limitation here. This will report the minimum version of the .NET runtime required for each executable and dll, but it will not tell you the maximum allowed. I have no idea how to determine that information from within powershell.

So this is useless, right? In my experience, this will let you rule out the vast majority of your applications. Lots of applications are written to target CLR 2.0 at a minimum, so any application reporting 2.0 or higher should work fine without .NET 1.1. I can rule them out and then focus my further research on the applications which can run on .NET 1.1.